RSSRandom A-List for Set: Jazz/Vocals
Jazz and popular (pre-rock) vocals.
Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Jazz/Vocals. Use your Reload button to get more.
Chet Baker: The Best of Chet Baker [2004, Riverside]Baker was the genius journeyman for whom Dave Hickey devised the freelancer's epitaph: "If This Dude Wasn't Dead, He Could Still Get Work." He recorded some 60 albums, and although I know I slightly prefer this 15-track '50s selection to Hickey's "all-time favorite record" Chet Baker Sings, and much prefer it to Bluebird's jazzier 1962 Chet Is Back!, I'm not about to explore them all. His adore-the-melody trick has its limits unless his white Oklahoman affect touches you like it does Hickey, the white Texan son of a swing musician with bebop dreams. So this is ideal. As someone who's always preferred Baker's singing to his trumpet, I was surprised to find that three vocals were only one short of what I would have preferred (words on "It Never Entered My Mind" later on, please), and surprised to swoon for the instrumental opener, a 1952 "My Funny Valentine" the notes claim was a hit. I was also surprised to hear more romance--and less "cool"--in this "My Funny Valentine"'s lyricism, sensuality, and bassline than in the contemporaneous version that opens Miles Davis Plays for Lovers. Thank Baker's smooth, soft, full, breathy sound. Thank Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and (on the two jazz compositions) Johnny Griffin. Thank Paul Chambers. Thank the melodies. A
The Comedian Harmonists:
The Comedian Harmonists [1999, Hannibal]
About 10 years ago, I fell for these Weimar pop phenoms in a five-hour documentary at the Public, where they performed American standards and trombone imitations in the vocal and sartorial regalia of the finest Lieder singers. The effect is somewhat less vivid on this, their first-ever U.S. release--although their harmonies penetrate, their comedy sometimes doesn't. But listen to them gurgle in tune before breaking into perfect German gibberish on "Kannst du pfeifen, Johanna?" and you'll get the idea. Beautywise they lived off the tenor of restaurant singer Ari Leschnikoff, likened by archivist Joe Boyd to Edith Piaf and Oum Kalsoum, though the Klezmatics' Lorin Sklamberg is more the point. A Bulgarian, he was one of the "Aryans" who got to stay in Germany when Goering deported the Jewish founder and his two fellow mongrelizers in 1935--they were too famous to kill, at least in 1935. In the film, he's a thin old man in a dreary Sofia housing project. He hasn't heard his own records in decades. He listens and weeps.
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Slim Gaillard:
Laughing in Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years [1994, Verve]
Operating so far to the left of Louis Jordan that he often passed as a weirdo, Gaillard stands as jazz's premier comedian-eccentric, the hepcat as novelty artist to end all novelty artists. Gaillard laughed in rhythm, barked in rhythm, clucked like a chicken in rhythm; he made up his own language, then adapted it to Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Incan; he was so fond of the suffix "rooney" (as in "You got the federation blues-o-rooney") that when introduced to Mickey Rooney he asked what his last name was. Although this 20-song collection from the '50s relegates "Flat Foot Floogie" to a medley and passes over "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti, Put-Ti)" and "Tutti Frutti" (o-rooney?), it swings and yucks whether the song is a remake, a new stroke, or a piece of Tin Pan Alley silliness. Having enjoyed a U.K. vogue before he died at 75 (or 80) in 1991, Gaillard is ripe. Be the first on your block.
A
Slim Gaillard:
Laughing in Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years [1994, Verve]
Operating so far to the left of Louis Jordan that he often passed as a weirdo, Gaillard stands as jazz's premier comedian-eccentric, the hepcat as novelty artist to end all novelty artists. Gaillard laughed in rhythm, barked in rhythm, clucked like a chicken in rhythm; he made up his own language, then adapted it to Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Incan; he was so fond of the suffix "rooney" (as in "You got the federation blues-o-rooney") that when introduced to Mickey Rooney he asked what his last name was. Although this 20-song collection from the '50s relegates "Flat Foot Floogie" to a medley and passes over "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti, Put-Ti)" and "Tutti Frutti" (o-rooney?), it swings and yucks whether the song is a remake, a new stroke, or a piece of Tin Pan Alley silliness. Having enjoyed a U.K. vogue before he died at 75 (or 80) in 1991, Gaillard is ripe. Be the first on your block.
A
Billie Holiday + Lester Young:
A Musical Romance [2002, Columbia/Legacy]
Last year's belated twofer (four repeats) sums her up, and I should mention the 10-CD box--better completist Holiday than Sinatra or Fitzgerald or George Jones. The year's other reshuffles, Lady Day Swings and Blue Billie, are useful product. But there's never been a Holiday record I've replayed as spontaneously as this one. Nor, and this is connected, have I ever found her so credible uptempo (meaning midtempo, and fast enough). Her disdain for the trifles her '30s producers fed her can be bracing but also wearing, and while none remain trifles, some remain unnecessary. Here, that's not a problem. In love or in pain, she's smiling, she's swinging, she's dealing with it, dropping so little hint of the tragedies to come you wonder whether they were inevitable after all. She just needs the support of a man as hip and confident as Prez sounds--relaxed, savvy, off-center but that just makes him more fun. On no record, including the excellent Ken Burns, will you ever hear him so unmistakably. In real life, unfortunately, guys who play that often have a mean streak and/or a dependent side. You wonder why couldn't she make do with the worldly wisdom of Teddy Wilson, the friendly sarcasm of Buck Clayton. Because here, they too keep her smiling and swinging.
A+
Nellie McKay:
My Weekly Reader [2015, 429]
Once the cabaret upstart was a golden faucet of song, but since she messed up her karma in 2007 by cracking a feminism joke that men didn't find cute, not to mention understand, the originals have dried up. So as cabaret stalwarts will, she's turned to Other People's Material. Having reimagined Doris Day in 2009, she ups the ante and reimagines the '60s in 2015. And from the sublime "Sunny Afternoon" and "If I Fell" to the ridiculous "Red Rubber Ball" and "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter," from the secret class politics of Alan Price and Moby Grape to the out-there freak politics of Frank Zappa and Jefferson Airplane, she manifests more historical grasp than any psych band yet to show its hand. Songs are so much easier to hold onto than acid visions you can only dream about.
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Nellie McKay:
Obligatory Villagers [2007, Hungry Mouse]
In an antirockist moment when faerie folkies airier than Joanna Newsom and disco dollies emptier than Rihanna are thought to promise a braver, freer future, why isn't this manifestly hypertalented young person a generational hero? Couldn't have any connection, could it, to the fact that no fewer than three netcrits--all, as it happens, men--don't understand that the opening laugh line, "Feminists don't have a sense of humor," is the well-turned piece of satire that makes everyone I play it for giggle? I agree--she's scattered, unfinished, self-indulgent. But she's also ebullient, funny and political. Her future looks brave and free to me.
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Nellie McKay:
Get Away From Me [2004, Columbia]
Hidden smack in the middle of each of these two nine-track CDs are two forgettable songs, leaving 16 of 18 that are memorable melodically, lyrically, or both, which would be an accomplishment for Randy Newman himself. Not counting Stephin Merritt, no other under-40 approaches McKay's gift for cabaret. The worst you can say is that her satire is shallow--dissing yuppies in the '00s is the precise terminological equivalent of dissing hippies in the '80s. But "Work Song" (bosses), "Inner Peace" (New Ageism), "It's a Pose" ("God you went to Oxford/Head still in your boxers") feel something like classic, and personal notes like the fond "Manhattan Avenue" and the fonder "Dog Song" suggest that soon her egomania will yield emotional complexities worthy of her talent.
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Nellie McKay:
Obligatory Villagers [2007, Hungry Mouse]
In an antirockist moment when faerie folkies airier than Joanna Newsom and disco dollies emptier than Rihanna are thought to promise a braver, freer future, why isn't this manifestly hypertalented young person a generational hero? Couldn't have any connection, could it, to the fact that no fewer than three netcrits--all, as it happens, men--don't understand that the opening laugh line, "Feminists don't have a sense of humor," is the well-turned piece of satire that makes everyone I play it for giggle? I agree--she's scattered, unfinished, self-indulgent. But she's also ebullient, funny and political. Her future looks brave and free to me.
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The Mills Brothers:
All Time Greatest Hits [1997, MCA]
Far blander than Decca's other prerock crossovers, the Ink Spots, these sons of the barbershop cultivated normality whether they were guesting for Bing, accompanying Ella, or bringing ditties to market. The 16 songs here are as anonymous as they are memorable, just like the close blend of brothers who shared so much DNA that on record they could almost be one Mills plus overdubs. None of their army of imitators ever got near their generic sound.
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Frank Sinatra:
Everything Happens to Me [1996, Reprise]
The Chairman on Reprise is a study in why artists shouldn't own record companies. My researches into a catalogue that runs to some 100 LPs have yet to uncover a single title that comes near the great Capitols, and the compilations are not to be trusted. So rather than spending $60 for the choppy 81-song box, try this 20-song oddity, supposedly programmed by Frank himself at age 79 and duplicating only seven box selections. It anoints more Don Costas than Nelson Riddles and is surprisingly scant on the Tin Pan Alley pantheon, the defining factor is tempo, almost always moderate or less, accentuating the autumnally ruminative mood of the songs and the old man who looked back on them so fondly. It ain't, to choose the Capitol remaster I've just glommed onto, Songs for Young Lovers/Swing Easy! But from the "suddenly you're a lot older" of the 1981 lead track, there's character here no callow 40-year-old would stoop to.
A
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson:
Kidney Stew Is Fine [1979, Delmark]
Cut in the early '70s with an all-star band featuring T-Bone Walker and Jay McShann, this was winning various grand prix in Europe as Wee Baby Blues long before it was released here. More tentative and human-scale, more felt perhaps, than The Original Cleanhead, it sacrifices power and presence as a result, but the material sounds loud enough, and at times Walker threatens to steal the record.
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